Random and Arbitrary thoughts, rants, opinions, and musings.
From a sometimes cynical and cranky Mom.

Friday, October 03, 2008

Radioactive Egg Sandwich done!

Tedious, mostly. I had to eat a sandwich made from microwaved and radioactive egg white and dry toast, with half a glass of water. It was a little hard to swallow, since it was pretty dang dry. Because they need a solids study, not a liquids study. Apparently we don't care how fast my gut processes liquids.

Then I had to lay still for 90 minutes while the machine that was 4 inches from my nose watched that egg travel from my stomach into my small and then large intestines. That was a little unnerving at first, having this big box right over me. I was very grateful it wasn't completely over my face.

I am thinking I do not have a problem with my stomach emptying too slowly, since the sandwich made it to my large intestine in 50 minutes.

(Were I to work in the Nuclear Medicine Element, I would want to have two patients take this test at the same time and place bets on whose sandwich moves through the fastest.)

Laying on my back on a narrow bed without moving for 90 minutes sucks. Things itch, my body doesn't like lying flat without moving so muscles start to hurt. And my sleeves were bugging me -- I had to pull them up to eat the sandwich (don't want to drag your sleeves through your radioactive breakfast) and I forgot to pull them down again. It's a new sweatshirt and they were a little tight around my forearms.

Fortunately I had my IPod, and fortunately I had almost exactly 90 minutes of battery power...I think it would have died in another couple minutes. I listened to a podcast of NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me radio show, which was great but also hard because it's funny and I had to try not to laugh or laugh without moving. (It's a great current events quiz show. Very funny. The podcasts are available on ITunes for free.)

Also, laying on my back is about the only position where I tend not to feel nauseated. So I hardly at all felt like I was going to throw up (nice change from the other time I was in Nuclear Medicine having a scan of my lungs done to make sure I didn't have a pulmonary embolism. That time I threw up in their garbage cans three times, including one time right after I had spent 10 minutes filling my lungs with radioactive dust, so that they had to treat that particular garbage can's contents as radioactive. For a couple of weeks, the hospital had a garbage bag with my radioactive vomit in their lead-lined vault. Woo.)

In a couple weeks I have the ultrasound of my gut. I also have a new drug -- Zofran -- to try for the nausea. I haven't tried it yet -- I didn't want to take one the night before the gastric emptying scan in case it's another one of those drugs that knocks me on my ass. I think I will try it tonight, depending of course on whether or not I am feeling nauseated.

Okay -- updating my profile because I never removed the guinea pigs from it, even though they have been elsewhere for months.

Um...new obsession (HA) the elliptical trainer in the garage. I hate the thing, but today I burned 395 calories. I know. I so wanted to burn 5 more to make it an even 400, but then I would be at 50 minutes and 19 seconds, so I would have to make that round out to an even 51 minutes, and then the mileage could be rounded up to a more even number, and then the calories would be just a few away from 450, but then I could do just a few more seconds, then another few hundredths of a mile, and so on until finally I would fall off, hit my head, end up in the hospital with another nasty concussion, and gain weight because I am bedridden. It was so much easier to just burn the 395 calories.

We moved from the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona to the almost Arctic of Anchorage. I like the winters of Anchorage better than the summers of Tucson, so far.

Still have three kids, the oldest one is a freshman at the U of Arizona (dang it, now I will have to edit this again in a few months), the other two live on Fort Richardson with me and the dogs and the husband.

Other obsessions...my camera, my IPod Touch, my sewing machine. Fabric. Definitely fabric. Dishes. It's a thing females in my family have, an obsession with dishes. Pottery, and earthenware. Silver, definitely. Not crystal and china though. I am not a big fan of the fussy and overly ornate, and both crystal and china tend to fall into those categories, to me. Plus if I have delicate dishware, then I can't have the kids wash the dishes or put it in the dishwasher.

Other than that, I weigh too much, sleep too little, am very liberal, rabidly pro-choice, find it insane this country does not have universal health care, and think the world may be a better place with Obama at the helm. Oh, yeah, and chocolate. Much much chocolate.